Although if it all requires a Cloud subscription and needing all the files uploaded to the cloud first, it's not going to appeal to that many people.

It seems that any new software subscription needs a cloud subscription, often for no apparent reason.

I guess that an iPad Lightroom would have fewer bells & whistles, and that its image processing pipeline could be heavily optimized/tailored for the last couple of generations of iPad cpu/gpu. It might demosaic and downscale to the native iPad resolution, and do most edits against that intermediate file (doing a full-res read only when zooming in, sharpening etc).

I don't want to do the bulk of my editing on a tablet. For some people it might be interesting for quick edits in the field, though.

I would rather have an iPad app that augmented my desktop Lightroom (like a Wacom) for cases where multi-finger interaction with the image or toolbox makes sense. Or an iPad app that lets me do all of my current "Library" functions against my NAS.

Two reasons I can see;More profit for Adobe.Integration with their whole 'big data' cloud proposition. If you've seen how Adobe Creative Cloud fits into their Adobe Marketing Cloud product, it makes sense... for that market at least. I suspect AMC is where Adobe see their big future revenue coming from. Those us at the bottom will just have to put up or shut up.

Two reasons I can see;More profit for Adobe.Integration with their whole 'big data' cloud proposition. If you've seen how Adobe Creative Cloud fits into their Adobe Marketing Cloud product, it makes sense... for that market at least. I suspect AMC is where Adobe see their big future revenue coming from. Those us at the bottom will just have to put up or shut up.

I have a feeling that occasionally, those big servers will be located in tax-heavens. A US software company would normally have to pay taxes to US right? What if the "cloud" is physically located in Bahamas or something like it, while the corporate structure/development is still happening in the US? Could they possibly split the company into two parts, making sure that the domestic division never make much money (and thus not much to tax)?

I hope Michael and Jeff talk about moving to a subscription service with Adobe on their next installment of LR. I'm getting the impression that this is the way to go as product cycles shorten. The new LR ability to use develop on a small file size is making this possible on the iPad. If the technology stores this small file in the cloud I could see this having benefit for those who work on the road.

Servers in tax havens...not sure this is a driving factor. I work in the cloud space and know that in country tax laws have the most impact on installation of new capital in a certain region. The second differentiator is labor law and use of intellectual property. The Patriot Act has a hand in how US companies deploy datacenters overseas.

Datacenters are often located in strategically cost effective areas but also need to consider latency issues as well as replication across datacenters. It's much more complicated than what folks see on the surface.

Big Data and Cloud are different animals although in most cases Big Data will use a cloud infrastructure as the underlying archetecture. Big Data usually has slower vCPU and vRAM via a greater oversubsription rate relative to a commerical cloud, and often uses the honking large storage devices - EMC Isilon as a way to keep the cost low. Big Data is all about analytics.

Cloud makes money through oversubsription. It's often all profit near the upper end of the capacity utilization models. The more virtual machines one can stuff into a given space, the more profit it will generate.

I'm getting the impression that this is the way to go as product cycles shorten.

Why ?The creative cloud applications aren't run 'in the cloud' they're still on your hard drive and any updates just have to be downloaded like any other software update in the past. It's just a way for Adobe to tie more people into the continual upgrade circus and paying more for it.

Whilst working with small selections of files and files of small sizes is workable via the cloud, I can't see it being a practical option when people are wanting to use big libraries of large files like digital photos.

I DO have all my 30K Raws (DNG's) up on the cloud as a backup to CrashPlan. Took like two weeks to upload the initial group. OK, with Smart Previews, that's less data and will take only a week.

So the idea is, I am going to somehow download a card I shot from my 5DMII into an iPad? Are you kidding? So short of that, I have to use my Mac and LR and ingest which we all knows takes time. I'm OK with that. Now the idea is, I'm going to run into the living room with my iPad to edit, sort, etc? I'm just fine doing this on my Mac with a big, calibrated display using fast processors and OS. I'm going to move into Develop on training wheel's on an iPad that isn't color managed? I think not.

I simply don't understand how to separate what appears to be 90% marketing hype from something that may be useful in a few years when tablets are as fast and efficient as last year's MacBook Pro.

I can put Raw's on the cloud today (my cloud, DropBox, CrashPlan). Now what? Other than a good offsite backup, why?

I don't want to keep banging on about this but.....I spent last week working at Adobe's EMEA digital marketing summit in London. Having seen how this all the AMC products link together with Creative Cloud it's not difficult to see how for some commercial photographers working via the Cloud could make business sense. It could quite easily become a requirement of employment that they provide their photographs via CC.

But I'm with you in not seeing it working for individuals, but will they care ?

I've been waiting for something like this for years. No, I have no intention of switching all my editing work to the iPad. What I want is the ability to manage my workflow when I'm travelling:

1. Load pics from my cards (Yes, a 64G iPad is big enough to hold all my shots for any trip where I wouldn't already be carrying a laptop)2. Check pic quality at the end of every day, to see if I need to reshoot anything3. Keyword shots while I still have a fresh memory of where/what they are4. Organize sets and collections.

Right now, I'm forced to carry a laptop on a lot of trips just for handling photos, and I'd really prefer to have only the iPad. If nothing else, just to avoid the TSA hassles.

Right now, I'm forced to carry a laptop on a lot of trips just for handling photos, and I'd really prefer to have only the iPad.

Me too. But the hardware isn't ready IMHO. Just like I could write a book on an iPad but I'd far prefer to use a desktop with MS word or similar. The other question is this: Does Adobe have the resources to go down this path while at the same time, getting LR to a performance level that just viewing images on a real system (a desktop Mac) provides a performance that doesn't sucks compared to the competition (PhotoMechanic, iPhoto which is free)?

Yes, adding a few keywords on my iPhone sounds fun. But can we get the Grid view to actually scroll though images at least half as slowly as iPhoto?

The right tool for the job is key. Engineering a kitchen knife to be a decent screw driver all while the knife is dull doesn't seem like a useful exercise.

The bit I'm not clear about is; who are Adobe driving development towards now ? Are the ordinary end users like us being ignored whilst they chase the big bucks from the corporate customers using their cloud products?

The bit I'm not clear about is; who are Adobe driving development towards now ? Are the ordinary end users like us being ignored whilst they chase the big bucks from the corporate customers using their cloud products?

Frankly I don't know. So far, this seems like a huge exercise in marketing more than anything else.

If the big corporates buy into the whole AMC business it's easy to see the way it'll go. It's the online marketeers and people making the web a commercial mammoth that are driving all this on and they're already happy with cloud working.

Jeff Schewe has said here many times that photographers using LR & PS really aren't very important to the big overall whole of Adobe now.

Jeff Schewe has said here many times that photographers using LR & PS really aren't very important to the big overall whole of Adobe now.

I didn't say that...what I said was photographers make up a small percent of the Creative Suite marketplace and that pro photographers make up a small percent of the Photoshop installed user base. As far as I know, photographers make up about 100% of the Lightroom user base (and between LR and ACR Adobe owns about 75% of the marketplace for raw processing).

But let's see if this thing they're proposing ever comes to fruition, and if it actually costs that much. I'm sure more than one app writer is already looking at something that would do what I'm asking, and those kinds of developers would be happy to vastly undercut that price, I'm sure.

From watching that interview at "The Grid" http://kelbytv.com/thegrid/2013/05/02/the-grid-episode-94-tom-hogarty-from-adobe/this iPad on Lightroom project does seem able to work with full raw files, with a limited set of adjustments implemented (so far), with the idea being that "the cloud thing" then just has to sync the small file describing the adjustments back to the Lr catalog on your computer, so that you can continue the work in full Lr there.